Many retail stores and shoppers use a variety of well-known collapsible shopping bags. Some stores supply these bags, and some customers bring their own bags. And, some bags are considered disposable, while others are re-usable.
FIGS. 2 and 3 illustrate one well-known type of collapsible shopping bag 201 which is typically constructed of heavy paper or cloth with an essentially rectangular shaped bottom, two sides 202, two ends 203, a pair of handles 205, with an opening at the top of the sides and ends to receive items to be carried in the bag 201. Typically, the ends are provided with creases, scores, seams or fold lines to allow them to be folded inward or outward, thereby allowing the sides to be brought adjacent to each other, rendering the bag into a flat configuration for storage, mass shipments, and distribution. FIG. 2 provides an isometric view of such a bag, and FIG. 3 provides a top-down view of such a bag, both in an open, non-collapsed configuration.
FIGS. 4 and 5 illustrate another well-known type of collapsible shopping bag 201′ which is typically fabricated from plastic film, or sometimes from cloth. It has less structural definition that the foldable bag 201 of FIGS. 2 and 3, but it also has two sides 202′, two ends 203′, a pair of handles 205′, with an opening at the top of the sides and ends to receive items to be carried in the bag 201′. Some historical sources credit Sten Gustaf Thulin with the very first creation of such a bag, described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,180,557, in 1962. Improvements continued to such bag designs to enable greater levels of mass production at lower and lower costs, such as the self-opening polyethylene (PE) bag invented by M. Wayne Beasley, et al., described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,335,788 in 1994. This particular design is sometimes referred to as a T-shirt bag, owing to its resemblance to a T-shirt shape when collapsed and flattened.
The proliferation and adoption of both bag types has been widespread due to the low cost, ability to print advertisements on the side, and the lack of space required to store the collapsed bags.